Word: mordant
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...President of the United States cannot resist, in dramatic televised addresses, making pointed reference to their latest bereavement. This is an age in which the Vice President, in consecutive convention speeches, makes lachrymose use, first, of a son's accident, then of a sister's death. (Noted one mordant wit: At this rate, his wife had better not walk near any plateglass windows.) In such an age, we can use the example of a man who through four presidential terms dealt with the agony of a nation while keeping his own agonies to himself...
...John Wayne's America (Simon & Schuster; 380 pages; $26) Garry Wills imagines that this must tell us something about the soul of postmodern America. And perhaps it does. But by the end of his confused and digressive meditation, this usually mordant cultural historian looks rather like a second heavy in a Wayne western--rubbing his jaw and spitting dust as the Duke's shade strides off toward the horizon, as impervious to academic analysis as he was to a bad man's six-shooter...
...some the new context of exile provided a degree of artistic stimulus. In London, Kokoschka got to know--largely through his Marxist friend the refugee German art historian Francis Klingender--the tradition of English caricature, the mordant images of Hogarth and Gillray; they are reflected in such paintings as Anschluss--Alice in Wonderland, 1942, with its trio of figures, the appeaser Neville Chamberlain, a German soldier and an Austrian Catholic bishop, imitating the Chinese monkeys that see no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil. And the ever alert Salvador Dali managed to include a number of proto...
...still tops polls asking us to identify our favorite movie stars some 18 years after his death must tell us something about the soul of post-modern America. And perhaps it does, says TIME's Richard Schickel. "But by the end of his confused and digressive meditation this usually mordant cultural historian looks rather like a second heavy in a Wayne western--rubbing his jaw and spitting dust as the Duke?s shade strides off toward the horizon, as impervious to academic analysis as he was to a bad man?s six-shooter." Wills thinks Wayne remains a psychic presence...
...other two novellas in Arkansas, The Wooden Anniversary and Saturn Street, are perfectly fine, filled with interesting characters and mordant wit. But The Term Paper Artist is spectacularly effective fiction, an oblique and very funny commentary on Leavitt's real-life travails. Having been accused of plagiarism, he spins out a story in which he happily abets plagiarists...